By Rick Posey, Vice President, AI at Cendyn
AI is already deciding how travelers see your hotel. Is it getting you right? As AI becomes part of the hotel discovery journey, visibility isn’t enough. Hotels need to know what AI is saying about them, and who it’s sending their way.
Everyone has been asking, “Are we in AI search?” But that’s not the only question we should ask. More importantly: “What version of your hotel is AI search presenting?”
AI is already shaping first impressions and influencing the shortlist before guests reach your website. With 91% of global travelers using ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and other AI tools to help them plan trips, they’re not just searching for hotels. They’re asking AI for specific recommendations.
If AI misunderstands your hotel’s strengths, you may never be considered, even if your property is the better fit. Visibility alone won’t win the booking. You need to be identifiable to the right audiences, with accurate data backing up the AI search narrative.
Being recommended isn’t enough
There’s an important distinction between ranking and recommending. Ranking is about appearing in a list; the holy grail of traditional SEO. Recommendation is about whether AI names your hotel when a traveler asks for advice.
You can rank highly and never get recommended. You can rank much lower and still be recommended regularly.
There’s another layer to this. AI isn’t just deciding whether to mention your hotel. It’s describing it, comparing it, and framing it for the traveler.
A guest might ask AI to recommend hotels for a romantic getaway, or support guests with specific disabilities. They might then ask which of those properties has the best restaurants, the best location, the best spa, or the best access to local attractions. Every answer shapes the next question. And every answer can influence the eventual booking decision.
How AI decides who your hotel is
AI doesn’t read your website in the same way a human does.
It synthesizes information from multiple sources to build an understanding of your hotel. Your website is one part of that picture. Google Business Profile, Bing Places, reviews, press coverage, third-party mentions, and other sources can all contribute to how AI understands your property.
Where information is vague, inconsistent, or missing, AI has less to work with. This creates a visibility risk. If your hotel describes itself as “ideally located near key attractions,” for example, that tells AI very little. A specific detail such as being “a 12-minute walk from The Met” gives it something much more useful to work with.
The same applies across your digital presence. A hotel called “The Great Hotel” on its website but “Great Hotel” on another platform may create uncertainty about whether the references relate to the same property.
Outdated information creates another problem. If your restaurant hours, amenities or renovation details have changed but older information remains elsewhere online, AI may surface the wrong answer at exactly the moment a traveler is making a decision.
If AI doesn’t understand what makes your hotel distinctive, it may recommend a competitor that communicates those attributes more clearly. These can look like small inconsistencies. But small inaccuracies can become commercial risks.
The hotels AI trusts will shape the booking journey
There are characteristics that help AI build a clearer, more confident understanding of a hotel.
- Structured, specific content gives AI meaningful details about your property rather than generic marketing language.
- Schema (structured data) and strong technical foundations help AI understand what kind of entity your hotel is and which facts about it are relevant and reliable.
- Consistent entity data across your website, business listings and third-party platforms makes it easier for AI to connect the different references to the same property.
- Fresh information helps ensure that the picture being formed is based on what is true today, rather than what was true several years ago.
- Third-party validation matters, as 85% of brand mentions in AI answers come from sources beyond your own website, including review platforms and press coverage.
- Detailed descriptions are more important than marketing clichés, because AI needs specific attributes it can connect to the nuanced questions travelers are asking.
This isn’t about gaming AI, but giving it a clearer, more consistent understanding of your hotel. If you leave gaps in that understanding, something else will fill them. Hotels that ignore this are essentially allowing the web to own the narrative about what their hotel is about.
A new question for hotel marketers
The go-to metrics for hotel marketers center on questions around rankings and traffic. These aren’t disappearing. But AI is introducing a new layer of questions that hotels need to start asking:
- Are we showing up in the AI conversations that matter to our strategy?
- Who is being recommended alongside us?
- What facts is AI using about our hotel, are they accurate and how are they repeated?
- Where is AI’s understanding of our property drifting from our own source of truth?
- What do we need to change or clarify to strengthen our visibility?
These are marketing and technical questions with commercial implications.
If AI consistently describes your hotel as a family-friendly resort when your focus is luxury couples, you’ll bypass your target market. If it fails to mention the feature that differentiates you from your competitors, you’ll lose out. If a competitor repeatedly appears alongside you, and AI gives them the attribute a traveler is looking for, you won’t be the top choice.
One of the challenges with this is that hotels can’t simply look at their own website and know what AI thinks. They need visibility into their AI visibility. That’s why Cendyn Wayfinder is becoming a central part of the process for hoteliers. Bringing together measures such as AI readiness, fact health, and competitive benchmark (share of models), it gives hotels greater awareness of how they are appearing across AI conversations, and where gaps may exist.
From visibility to understanding
The industry shift is real, and the guest journey is changing. Travelers can now move from a broad question to choosing a hotel without ever following the traditional search journey hotels have spent two decades optimizing for.
That changes what visibility means. Hotels are no longer just competing to be found. They’re competing to be understood. Since AI processes information rather than experiencing a hotel, the nuances that feel obvious to a human marketer can easily get lost. The details need to be clear. The data needs to be consistent. The story needs to stack up across the digital ecosystem.
This is where Wayfinder can help. Built into Cendyn CMS, it gives hotels visibility into how AI platforms are representing their property, bringing together measures such as AI readiness, fact health, and how often they appear in AI recommendations. That gives hotel teams a clearer view of what AI is getting right, what it isn’t, and where action can make a difference.
Hotels that take control of how AI understands their property will be the ones that successfully Find, Book, and Grow in this new era. Being visible is only half the battle. The real advantage is making sure AI gets your hotel right.
BIO: Rick Posey is Vice President, AI at Cendyn. Drawing on leadership roles at
iCIMS, Sabre Hospitality Solutions, and Preferred Hotels & Resorts, he brings
extensive experience in AI, digital strategy, product management, eCommerce,
and web analytics.
His blend of hospitality and technology expertise helps drive AI innovation that
empowers hotels to enhance performance and deliver more personalized guest
experiences.
About Cendyn
Cendyn is a global hospitality cloud-based technology company that enables hotels to drive revenue, maximize profitability, and create deeper connections with guests through its integrated solutions. Serving hoteliers for nearly 30 years, Cendyn drives commercial success for hotels through its Find, Book, Grow promise: find the right guests, drive them to book direct, and grow loyalty and revenue across the spectrum of digital guest interactions.
Cendyn has over 35,000 customers worldwide in more than 150 countries generating more than $20 billion in annual hotel revenue. The company supports its growing customer base from locations across the globe, including the United States, France, the United Kingdom, Singapore, Bangkok, and India.
To find out more, visit cendyn.com
